The Ominous Story of Syria's Climate Refugees
Publisher: Scientific American
Author(s): John Wendle
Date: 2015
Topics: Climate Change, Humanitarian Assistance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Syrian Arab Republic
Climatologists say Syria is a grim preview of what could be in store for the larger Middle East, the Mediterranean and other parts of the world. The drought, they maintain, was exacerbated by climate change. The Fertile Crescent—the birthplace of agriculture some 12,000 years ago—is drying out. Syria’s drought has destroyed crops, killed livestock and displaced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers. In the process, it touched off the social turmoil that burst into civil war, according to a study published in March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. A dozen farmers and former business owners like Ali with whom I recently spoke at camps for Syrian refugees say that’s exactly what happened.
Syria’s water crisis is largely of its own making. Back in the 1970s, the military regime led by President Hafez al-Assad launched an ill-conceived drive for agricultural self-sufficiency. No one seemed to consider whether Syria had sufficient groundwater and rainfall to raise those crops. Farmers made up water shortages by drilling wells to tap the country’s underground water reserves. When water tables retreated, people dug deeper. In 2005 the regime of Assad’s son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, made it illegal to dig new wells without a license issued personally, for a fee, by an official—but it was mostly ignored, out of necessity. “What’s happening globally—and particularly in the Middle East—is that groundwater is going down at an alarming rate,” says Colin Kelley, the PNAS study’s lead author and a PACE postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost as if we’re driving as fast as we can toward a cliff.”